Frankly, the Year from Hell can go to hell. Here it is, New Year’s Eve 2020, and I’m glad to be seeing the back of the past 12 months. And I’m sure I won’t be Robinson Crusoe in that regard.

We should have guessed it was going to be a shocker because 2020 began rather ominously. Barely out of the drought, and under assault from the worst fires in recorded history, we were treated to an unseemly row over whether or not our prime minister should watch the conflagration of his country from a beachside holiday letting in Honolulu.

Then, piling angst onto misery, his belated attempt to humanise his hurried return by visiting the devastated NSW township of Cobargo was a PR disaster. Could it get any worse? Yes it did, with the ramifications of Covid-19 still with us and likely to bleed well into 2021. But here, on the cusp between those two years, did we learn anything from the Year from Hell?

I thought we had, with examples of independence and initiative and a helping hand anywhere you wanted to look. Even our leaders seemed to catch on to the prevailing mood and, even if it seems a distant memory now, I think I can still whistle the ‘We’re all in this together’ tune.

However, let’s face facts: We in Australia were helped immeasurably in the struggle against Covid by the thinness on the ground here of anything like the camo-clad, gun-toting vigilantes who make governance of the United States such a nightmare. No-one loves his freedom more than I, but when these ugly clowns say they are standing over elected public officials in the name of freedom, while rattling a menacing AK-47 (egged on by the super clown in the White House), I shudder to think what they might mean by “freedom”.

But it seems that this brief nirvana of Aussie cooperation was not meant to last. As Federal Parliament wound up its business for the year, it was as if 2020 had never happened: All the old nasties were back on the notice paper – penalty rates, Chinese subversion (with selected omissions, of course), cashless welfare cards, Robodebt. Nasty but normal. And given the struggle to make this country one of the few Covid-safe spaces in the world, depressingly normal.

What does it take for the people who govern us to understand that we could only beat Covid by all being in this together, I wonder? That the prevailing dog-eat-dog attitudes had to be driven underground if we were going to defeat the pandemic? I just don’t know, because if the last week of the parliamentary sitting is any indication, (huge) dog is still eating (little) dog. Just as ravenously as before. And who knows where that will end.

But that’s the big picture. The Year from Hell gave us 25 million Aussie little pictures. I can only comment on what I saw and despite the hype from the marketing department in Canberra, I don’t think we came out of it all that well. I’m not talking about whether the economy should be opened up, which was just about the extent of any public discussion of the impact of the pandemic on our social fabric. It went much deeper than that.

I saw many examples of people who were excluded from the Jobkeeper support payment (while a lucky few were able to use it to award themselves handsome bonuses), with the result that as economic activity wound down, life savings were inevitably drained.

I saw people who lost regular work yet received no emergency support, while still having to meet their daily necessities. How well placed will they be if the Canberra-touted recovery turns out to be another mirage? And this is not just hyperbole, it’s real, as I have seen my own nest-egg dwindle to a few daggy twigs in just 12 months. We made it, but if there is a second wave of real pain, what then? In the end, however, I am sure the stoic in all of us will prevail and we’ll get through. Somehow.

But what about our dreams? Has anyone in Canberra ever stopped for a moment and thought that those 25 million out there aren’t Bureau of Statistics numbers, they are real people, just like themselves, with real hopes and aspirations.

If I ever allowed myself the luxury of peering over the ramparts of the present to imagine something impossibly dazzling in the future, it would be this. For me, 2020 began with Cobargo, an adjunct to 20 years of NSW south coast holidays, reduced to a blackened shell, and it ended with nearby Bermagui becoming the symbol of a thwarted imagination.

It had always been our dream that when the boys were settled in something stable, we might get our own small reward by packing up and jumping in the car and heading down the far south coast. For good. Lovely environment, beautiful weather where you can go onto the beach at any time of the day and not feel you’re walking on molten glass. But, above all, affordable. That was before Covid.

Up until 2019, the Beautiful People could jet off anywhere their fancy took them, to Bali, Galle, Portofino, Acapulco, leaving the sandfly-and-mozzie infected coasts of Oz to the Not So Beautiful People, like me. But then Covid struck, and in the wake of the closure of international travel, the Beautiful People discovered that if you smother yourself in various protective ointments to ward off the midges, those boring old places on the Aussie map that their parents used to ramble on about can be surprising little treasures.

And the result? House prices in every little hamlet from Mission Beach to Merimbula have gone through the roof, and with them, the dreams of countless Aussies, hoping against hope for that one last chance to get off the treadmill. Still, it was only a dream, and the thing about dreams is that you do, eventually, wake up. As I said earlier, Covid will have a way of ensuring that its legacy lingers on long after the last defibrillator has been packed away in mothballs.

But I’ve still got my eyesight (a couple of cataracts notwithstanding), my health hasn’t packed it in (bar the occasional arthritic twinge), my crazy cat still looks at me with admiration (or is it hunger) in his eyes, and my family is still by my side. It mightn’t be beautiful, but it’s rather comely, I must say, so whatever 2021 throws at me, I’ll take it.

And as for you, dear reader. The foregoing might seem a little bleak to accompany my good wishes for a Happy New Year, but at the very least, 2021 must, by definition, be happier than 2020. And that’s something worth letting off fireworks for.